I would like to see a hotkey entry in the houdini/playbar context for the real time toggle. I realize i can bind fplayback -r on/off to a function key but i still think it's important enough to exist in the hotkey manager as well.. Plus, that option creates two hotkeys. One to turn it off and one to turn it on (unless i'm missing a toggle option somewhere). It seems especially important with dops now because you'll want to cache the sim in non realtime so it gets every frame.. But once it's cached, you wanna switch on real time so it doesn't fly by during playback..
In the Global Animation Options dialog, if you turn on “Play every frame but never faster than FPS”, DOPs or Cache SOPs will be able to cache every frame. Effectively, you can leave the Realtime toggle on all the time with the option.